The International Consumer Electronics show came to an end less than a week ago, and Boxee seemed to steal the spotlight both on the show floor and in awards alike. They won the “Last Gadget Standing” accolade along with Popular Science naming them “Best of CES.” You may have seen the Boxee logo showcased on the bosom of the stunning Bob and lovely Jaylin, who also came to profess their nerdy love for this revolutionary device.



The Boxee Box specifically, presented by D-Link, has earned many honors since its announcement. We have been hearing a lot about how amazing it is, the way it will change how we experience media in our homes, and lists of feature after feature that sound cool. But you may have been thinking:

After meeting the Boxee and D-Link team at this year's CES, I am here to help!

For quite some time now, the big deal in home entertainment has been the Home Theater PC (HTPC for short). HTPCs allow us to play, through our home theater or other audio/video setup, all our media, including recording and playing television signals through the use of a TV tuner, CDs and DVDs (including Blu-Ray), downloaded, stored, or streamed videos, music, and pictures, or even direct playback of media from the Internet (such as flash video from Youtube). The HTPC is basically your PVR/Tivo, a CD player, mp3 player, Blu-Ray DVD player, media manager, and web browser all in one. Properly set up and configured an HTPC can become the nexus of a stunning home entertainment system.



Boxee (the software) is an open-source media center designed to be the heart of an HTPC. Born of the XBMC (formerly Xbox Media Center) project, it is engineered to be easily controllable by someone sitting comfortably on their couch watching television (the so-called “10 foot interface”). Some of the interesting things about Boxee compared to other media center programs available are that it has a built-in bittorrent client (for those of you who acquire multimedia from the Internet), and it is designed to be a social networking platform. You are required to register a username to use Boxee, but your login will become a tool for sharing with your friends (and rating) everything you are listening to, watching, or reading. It also has built-in Facebook and Twitter integration to make communicating with your friends even easier.

Here is a demonstration of some of its new features being displayed at the Boxee booth at CES:



Boxee is available for download should you want to make your own HTPC. However, the greatest drawback to the HTPC today is that it requires a lot of effort (and can require a lot of cash) to set up and maintain. The PC components must be carefully chosen, as must the operating system and media center. Even for someone who has experience setting up Linux servers (like me) this can be a very time-consuming and somewhat daunting task.



Enter the Boxee Box by D-Link, running on custom hardware and a modified version of Linux. The reason this gadget has captured the attention and buzz of the consumer electronics industry is because of how simple it makes the whole process. Instead of purchasing hardware, building your PC (or paying someone to do it), installing and configuring the software, and keeping it all up to date and working properly, you can simply purchase the Boxee Box to do all of this for you at a very competitive price.

So for the very first time the HTPC will become a practical reality for people who don't have the patience to build one themselves, or the knowledge or desire to maintain a PC when all they want to do is watch movies. The wealth of features that an HTPC used to provide to a very knowledgeable (or wealthy) few will become available to everyone, in an attractive, convenient package. There are a lot of reasons to love the Boxee Box; I think it can be to the home theater what Tivo was to watching television.



And, best of all, Boxee has its own Suicide Girls application, and we all know boobs are even better in 1080p!